In the manufacture of sport shirts and the like it is the usual practice to circularly knit tubular fabric for use in forming the body and sleeve portions and to dye this circular knit fabric to obtain a particular color shade. The knit trim, such as the collars, cuffs, and/or welts and the like, is normally knit with multiple ends of the same type of yarn but in a rib knit construction on a V-bed knitting machine with successive trim blanks being held together by a separator thread. Rolls of the trim fabric are usually dyed with the circular knit body fabric in an attempt to obtain the desired color shade in both the body fabric and the trim fabric. However, it is difficult to obtain exactly the sam color in both fabrics because the fabrics are knit with different stitch constructions, the trim fabric is heavier than the body fabric, and the dye bath tends to shrink the fabrics differently. When sport shirts are manufactured in accordance with this conventional method, it is not unusual to reject about 20% of the sport shirts because the dyed color of the trim does not exactly match the dyed color of the body of the shirt.
In an attempt to overcome this high rejection rate, sport shirts and the like have been manufactured by a yarn dye process. In this process, yarn packages of both the yarn from which the body and sleeve portions is to be knit and the yarn from which the trim is to be knit are dyed together in the same dye bath. It is difficult to obtain the exact same color yarn from outside to inside of wound yarn packages. Even when the body fabric and the trim fabric are both knit from yarns which have been dyed together, they may appear to be of a different color because the trim fabric is knit of multiple ends of the yarn and is knit in a different stitch construction.